Excerpt:
There are many well known accounts of the history of visual science (some references are given below) but it seems hard to find a simple chronological listing of major events. Sometimes such a list can be helpful in gaining a quick historical perspective. This note presents a chronology listing 133 significant events between 1600 and 1960. In addition, for completeness sake, there is a brief preliminary section that sketches the history of visual science before 1600. All of this material is based on standard secondary sources: the author is not a specialist in the history of science, and the object here is not to contribute anything new to the history of vision research but rather simply to collate material already scattered throughout the literature--though of course the choice of "significant" events is idiosyncratic.